The gap in broadband adoption is shrinking between rural Minnesota and the Twin Cities, but a new digital divide is opening over bandwidth, a new study says.

The Twin Cities have much faster access while rural Minnesotans are still hobbled by slower connections that limit what they can see and do online.

In rural Minnesota, 70.6 percent of households have some form of broadband Internet access, compared with 79.2 percent of households in the seven-county Twin Cities area, according to the study by the Center for Rural Policy and Development.

But while they have broadband access, rural Minnesotans do not have fast enough connections to do what Twin Cities residents regularly can do, such as access streaming video, the study said.

Rural Minnesotans also are paying more than Twin Cities residents for slower broadband, according to the report. Rural residents are paying an average of $47.57 a month for Internet while Twin Cities users get their Internet for an average of $45.57, the report said.

A bandwidth gap could put the rural part of the state “at a significant disadvantage,” according to the report, which was released in Duluth on Tuesday, Nov. 13, at the Blandin Foundation’s annual conference on broadband access.

“Businesses do everything on the Internet these days, and distance learning and remote health care are being held up as solutions for educator and doctor shortages in rural areas, but many communities still don’t have the Internet capacity to handle the kind of data flows these uses call for,” Marnie Werner, research manager at the Center for Rural Policy Development and the study’s chief author said in a statement.

The study does not recommend a solution to fix the speed gap, but it may get policy-makers and the telecommunications industry to look closer at the issue, said Brad Finstad, executive director of the center.

“For a long time, the focus of policy-makers was on access,” he said. “With the information we’ve found here, they will hopefully focus more on the quality of the product or the speed of the product.”

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